Employee Spotlight: Akshay Dhawale - Solutions Engineer

In this blog series, we highlight members of the Kentik team, what they’re working on, and their most memorable moments within the company. In this Q&A, meet Akshay Dhawale, a senior solutions engineer here at Kentik.

What is your role at Kentik?

Akshay: I am a senior solutions engineer with Kentik and focus on supporting digital businesses. I spend most of my time helping customers up-level their #observability game and making network data more informative and actionable.

How long have you been at Kentik?

Akshay: 4 years and several code builds.

Where do you live?

Akshay: Dallas, Texas — but mostly at portal.kentik.com!

What made you want to work at Kentik?

Akshay: I met the co-founders and the sales teams at a NANOG years ago and thought that every single person I spoke with was so passionate about the technology and the opportunity to build a network engineer’s dream platform. This excitement brushed on me throughout my interviews and it continues till today as we speak to new potential candidates.

I will also say, rocking the cool(est) Kentik T-shirts might have had a particularly significant weightage in wanting to be a part of this kClub.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do at Kentik?

Akshay: Presenting the Kentik Experience at Tech Field Day for our Insights launch was probably the coolest thing I’ve been able to do at Kentik. Helping a customer monetize their network data was kinda cool, too.

What keeps you at Kentik?

Akshay: We have a great team of diverse people who you can learn so many things from (like home automation for a chicken coop, or dishing out a perfect Roy Choi sandwich!). Not to mention, the underlying tech and being led by a great CEO!

How would you describe your coworkers?

Akshay: “Kind tinkerers.” That’s almost a prereq for Kentikians!

What’s your most memorable or favorite company event or offsite?

Akshay: Our company offsite in Park City, Utah and after-dinner parties.

What’s your favorite Kentik Slack topic?

Akshay: The #random channel.

(Kentik sidenote: This Slack channel is labeled for “non-work banter, watercooler conversation and interesting hobbies (mostly trees).” True story: In the last five photos uploaded to #random, all five photos had at least one tree featured. We stay ‘logged’ into this channel!)

What are you most excited about over the next year or two here?

Akshay: Kentik’s total addressable market (TAM) continues to grow as we expand our technology to support major public clouds, synthetic performance monitoring, and our battle-tested edge and data center core visibility solutions.

I most look forward to how we go-to-market with solutions that integrate these three realities of operating any networks today and everything that follows from this recent announcement.

Want to work with Akshay and the rest of the Kentik team? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.